


thought i had it right (but i'm still lost)

by istalria



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arthur Pendragon Returns (Merlin), Bars and Pubs, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Reincarnation, Resurrection, Songfic, Sort of? - Freeform, Temporary Character Death, You've been warned, no beta we die like men, this is pretty sad guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23388790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istalria/pseuds/istalria
Summary: The thing about hope is that it makes disappointment so much harder.Merlin knows a lot about hope.  It's all he's been doing, isn't it, for the last millenium?  Hoping and waiting and trying and failing to move on.Lazy prat, he thinks, in a sudden bout of fury.Lazy, ungrateful sod, lying around for thousands of years, leaving me to pick up the pieces.He drains his glass and relishes the burn of alcohol down his throat.  This pain he can deal with; this pain is clean and sharp and leaves relief trailing in its wake.
Relationships: Gwaine/Percival (Merlin), Merlin/Arthur Pendragon, Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 157





	thought i had it right (but i'm still lost)

**Author's Note:**

> Title (and some themes/concepts) from _Reforget_ by Lauv. Such a good song, by the way, and I would 100% recommend listening to it while reading this fic.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

i.

Merlin hates mornings.

Once, lifetimes ago, Merlin hadn’t minded rising early. Had relished it, even, enjoyed the peace of the minutes between waking and scurrying off to attend to his morning duties.

(He’d enjoyed those duties, too: had enjoyed the task of preparing Arthur for another day as prince, as king; had savored the easy silence between them as he smoothed down fabric and chainmail with a few more soft touches than was strictly necessary. Had held those unguarded moments close to his heart throughout the day, the one vice he’d allowed himself.)

It was the nights he’d hated, at least after Camlann and Avalon and his final, sickening failure. Nights he’d loathed, nights he’d resented, because each one marked another day wasted, another day his king hadn’t made his return.

It wasn’t until the days stretched into years and the years into centuries that Merlin began to dread the dawn. Another day Arthur might return, yes, but more likely another day he wouldn’t. Another day for Merlin to wait, and mourn, and remember.

The remembering was too much, sometimes, and Merlin found himself passing the nights in taverns turned bars turned nightclubs. Then sometimes became all the time, and Merlin began greeting the morning sun with a throbbing head and hazy memories, and he hated it, hated his weakness and his inability to forget completely.

Merlin hates mornings. 

He especially hates mornings like this, when his alarm clock—truly a poor investment—cuts through his raging headache with its shrill insistence that he get up and face the day. 

Merlin glares at the clock, contemplates obliterating it with a thought. Decides against it; it’s not worth the trouble, anyway, as he’d only have to purchase a new one, and really, it isn’t the clock’s fault he’s miserably hungover.

He tosses a pillow across the room anyway. It’s not quite as satisfying as he’d hoped when the pillow goes sailing into the hall. 

He wonders, for a moment, if this was how Arthur felt when Merlin came to his chambers to wake him, chipper and persistent; wonders at the irony, because—

Because it had always been Arthur who pitched fits and lobbed the occasional bit of crockery in the morning. Arthur, not Merlin, who grumbled and slouched and resisted every effort to get him moving. Arthur who griped about Merlin’s tardiness but resented the days he arrived on time, who Merlin had physically dragged from his bed more frequently than either of them would have admitted to—

Just for a moment, though, because it’s all he can bear. 

He drags himself out of bed, because his alarm is still blaring, and he’s already regretting the mercy he’d shown it.

ii.

“Back so soon?”

Merlin glares at the bartender’s cheeky grin, but relents when she pushes a glass at him. It’s probably not _great_ that all the employees of his current favorite pub have memorized his drink order, but then, Merlin hasn’t claimed to make good decisions in a very long time.

He tips his glass at her. “You’re an angel, Alex.”

Alex is a uni student, twenty-one and lovely, with a smile made for wringing tips out of drunken customers. Alex reads fantasy novels behind the counter when business is slow, and wants to be a writer, and refused to give Merlin her last name when he began frequenting the pub, because _you seem like a nice guy, but you just never know, do you, and I refuse to let a murder, especially mine, be my first claim to fame._ Alex-not-Alexia, who watches with a hint of disapproval as Merlin knocks back his drink and slides the empty glass back at her.

He affects innocence. She glares. He raises his brows. She sighs and fixes another drink.

It’s a well-worn argument. Merlin knows she could win—she has a glare to rival Morgana’s, and no, there’s another twist of the knife—if he didn’t tip so well. She’s at university, after all, and hardly in the position to turn down a well-paying customer, however much she frets over his supposed alcoholism. At this point, she’s probably right about him.

Not like Arthur, he thinks, as the rum burns down his throat. Always assuming Merlin was slacking off at the tavern, always wrong, without a clue that Merlin was saving his precious Camelot every other week. No, not like Arthur at all, because his days in the tavern were a lie, but his nights at the pub, ordering round after round from disapproving young uni students, are painfully real.

“So,” Alex says as she reluctantly accepts Merlin’s empty glass. “What is it this time? Are the destiny dragons bothering you again?”

Merlin’s favorite thing about the twenty-first century has to be people’s willingness to accept even the most outlandish of stories. The first time he’d told Alex, after several hours of steady drinking, that he’d once defeated an immortal army by knocking over a magical chalice with an enchanted sword, she’d just nodded and passed him another shot. 

“Haven’t we all?” she’d asked with a wry tilt of her lips.

Her tacit disbelief was permission enough for him to begin telling her stories, things he remembered and things he fabricated. Merlin wasn’t sure, at first, what good it did, telling her about his adventures, about the people he’d loved and lost—at best she’d think he was touched in the head, at worst, that he was telling the truth and ought to be poked and prodded in some laboratory somewhere. He’d realized eventually that Alex had probably heard all manner of strange things, working where she did, and he let her easy, amused acceptance lighten his burden, just a little.

At the very least, his wild tales are always a decent diversion when she grows too concerned about the amounts of alcohol he consumes on a regular basis.

Not that it’s her business, strictly speaking. But there’s something comforting about knowing someone cares enough to ask despite his seemingly far-fetched excuses. Though he’s noticed that telling his stories usually distracts him, too, and he drinks less and wakes up with a slightly less torturous headache, so maybe Alex is just far cleverer than he is.

“Not this time,” he says. “Just got bored waiting.”

She hums in consideration, fiddling with something behind the bar. “Your prince hasn’t come for you yet, then?”

“King,” he corrects before he can think better of it.

“Sure, but that’s not in the song.”

Having apparently run out of excuses to delay the inevitable, she passes him his drink. He doesn’t respond, instead taking another long swig. 

He’ll miss this, he thinks idly, because he’ll have to move on eventually. He always does. Merlin avoids aging as much as he can, even though it would let him settle in one place for more than a handful of years. Even magically-affected age is painful to endure, and if some small part of him wants to be easily recognizable when—if—Arthur returns, well. It’s easier to remain youthful regardless; easier to go before he gets too attached, before he has to watch another entire generation of friends age and die and leave him behind. So many people have left him behind.

He drains his glass.

Alex groans, but Merlin’s mind is growing blessedly murky, and he wonders, through the haze, if he’ll get lucky this time and actually manage to forget.

He knows he won’t, but he slides a few bills across the sticky wood and extends his hand for another drink.

iii.

Merlin hasn’t been to the lake—what’s left of it, anyway—in years. There’s only so much pain he can take, and everything is sharper at Avalon.

Sometimes he almost convinces himself that it was all a dream, that Camelot, that Arthur and Gaius and Lancelot and all the rest, were only figments of his imagination, that the stories he spins for Alex at the pub are products of an overactive imagination, nothing more. Almost, but not quite; he can never escape the memories completely. It’s why he avoids the field where he said goodbye to Arthur for the last time, set him adrift on a lake long since replaced by dirt and grass. He can’t lie to himself when he stands here, staring at a half-collapsed tower and the crumbled remains of the hut he’d lived in for the first hundred-odd years. 

He’d laid the foundation right where Percival found him, after everything. He said nothing as he approached, just sat next to Merlin in the long grass and wrapped one massive arm around his shoulders. 

Merlin thinks he might have been crying. He knows Percival was, when they traded stories, his voice breaking over the details of his and Gwaine’s last ill-fated mission.

_You didn’t fail, Gwaine,_ he thought, as Percival shook with grief or rage or a terrible combination of the two. _I did._

Eventually, Percival looked at him in the dying light. 

“You’re not coming back, are you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. 

Merlin shook his head. “I can’t.” He hoped Gauis understood. He wished he could imagine going back to Camelot and living there, in Arthur’s castle, his home, without him. 

Percival didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to. He left at dawn, returning with Leon and a cart full of supplies. They built Merlin’s house from the ground up, and Merlin refrained from using magic to speed the process. He relished every scrape and splinter and sore muscle. He was glad Percival hadn’t brought an entire retinue of knights—maybe Percival and Leon needed this as much as he did; a physical outlet for the grief fighting to bring him to his knees if he gave it any leeway. 

And then the hut was finished, and they left, and Merlin stayed behind. 

He remained on the shores of Avalon for decades, a century; long past the point where he thought his presence might hasten Arthur’s return. Visitors from Camelot came and went, until they didn’t, and Merlin knew there was nothing keeping him there, but he didn’t know where else to go. What would he do, out in the world, left to his own devices? What point was there in trying to live his life without any guiding purpose?

The tedium grew too much for him eventually, settling into his bones like a disease. He wasn’t doing any good at Avalon, but knowing that did little to quell the feeling that he was committing a grievous betrayal when he left. 

Merlin hasn’t visited the lake in years, and now, staring out across the grassy plain, he wonders what he’d imagined might have changed. His magic had been itching for days, and some almost-buried spark of hope had whispered that maybe it was time, maybe he’d waited long enough, maybe Arthur was coming back.

But there’s nothing left for him at Avalon but memories, and Merlin has enough of those. 

iv.

The thing about hope is that it makes disappointment so much harder.

Merlin knows a lot about hope. It’s all he’s been doing, isn’t it, for the last millenium? Hoping and waiting and trying and failing to move on. Maybe he should be used to it by now; maybe it shouldn’t still hurt so badly every time something terrible happens and passes and the world moves on. It probably makes him a terrible person, to feel anticipation instead of just horror at the first hint of war, plague, famine. He doesn’t want anyone to suffer—of course he doesn’t—but he can’t help hoping that each global catastrophe might be the one to rouse Arthur from his centuries of slumber.

_Lazy prat,_ he thinks, in a sudden bout of fury. _Lazy, ungrateful sod, lying around for thousands of years, leaving me to pick up the pieces._

He curses his magic, too, for keeping him alive all these years. Arthur had died for his destiny and still got the better end of the deal; it was easier to slip through the centuries unaware. It was Merlin who had watched the world change and grow around him, unable to catch up or join in its progress. 

He relishes the burn of alcohol down his throat. This pain he can deal with; this pain is clean and sharp and leaves relief trailing in its wake.

Alex isn’t working tonight, and her replacement doesn’t bother to shake his head when Merlin flags him down for another round.

v.

“Don’t you dare.”

Alex raises her brows, the picture of innocence, but Merlin isn’t fooled. She’s not nearly as subtle as she imagines.

“You’re watering down my drinks, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Her lips form a thin line, but she hands him his next drink undiluted. Merlin tries to ignore her dirty looks as he drains it.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he says when she just glares instead of refilling his glass. “Friends support friends in their drinking pursuits.”

Alex grabs the glass with more aggression than Merlin feels is warranted. Her stare is frosty enough to make him squirm, just a little, where he sits on his barstool.

“Friends don’t let friends drink themselves to death,” she snaps as she slams his drink down. 

Merlin idly wonders if he should be offended—he is a paying customer, after all—or touched—not many bartenders would actively resist someone’s alcoholic tendencies. 

“Sorry to tell you there’s no point. This one’s a lost cause, always has been.”

Merlin whips his head over his shoulder to snap back before his mind catches up with the fact that _he knows that voice_. It’s his heart that registers the truth first, picking up speed even before the retort dies on his tongue, even before he catches the golden hair and laughing eyes and uncertain smile.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Arthur says.

Merlin is—Merlin is gaping at him, Merlin is trying to find the words he’s waited over a thousand years to speak and coming up blank, Merlin isn’t even breathing.

Alex doesn’t have the same problem.

“You two know each other?” she asks, and her voice is low, cautious, probably because Merlin is still staring wide-eyed at the man who can’t possibly be Arthur Pendragon. It can’t be him, because nowhere in the hundreds of thousands of reunions he’s imagined did Arthur stroll up to him at the pub, casual as anything, and order a drink.

“Oh, we’ve known each other for ages, isn’t that right, Merlin?” Not-Arthur is sliding onto the barstool next to him, grinning as their arms jostle, and Merlin knows he was wrong, this has to be Arthur, because no one else could be so arrogant as to _die_ and keep him waiting for centuries and turn back up like it’s nothing.

“I’m not surprised to find you here,” Arthur continues. “You always were a bit too fond of the tavern, weren’t you?”

“You—you—” Merlin is sputtering, searching for words, for air. Alex is glancing between them like she might need to have Arthur removed from the premises, and Merlin spares a moment to be grateful for her undeserved protective streak. 

Arthur just watches him, regret and amusement and something indecipherable dancing across his features, and Merlin finally explodes.

“You _prat!_ ” He’s on his feet now, they both are, and he’s jabbing at Arthur’s chest. “You absolute _clotpole_ , do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for you? And then for you to just—to just show up, how dare you, you _dollophead_ —”

“Still not a word,” Arthur says, but he’s smiling, the soft, genuine smile Merlin had feared, in his darkest moments, he might never see again. “I missed you too, idiot.”

And—oh. Merlin’s eyes are wet, and he thinks they probably have been for a while, and he toys with the idea of being embarrassed by the kind of scene he must be making, but he can’t scrounge up an ounce of regret.

“Oh,” Alex says, softer now, and Merlin startles. “Is this…” She trails off for a second, glances at Arthur, then lowers her voice like it’ll make a difference, and Merlin would laugh if he weren’t trying so hard not to cry. “Is this, you know, _him_?”

“Yeah,” he manages, still staring at Arthur; golden, brilliant Arthur standing in this dingy pub in a white tee and jeans, grinning at him in the low light. “Yeah, this is—this is Arthur.”

She gives him a bewildered sort of smile, then rounds on Arthur, brandishing an empty glass. “You, sir, have some serious apologizing to do, and you’d better hope you have a great explanation.”

Arthur’s face is a sight to behold. “I—well, I…” He glances at Merlin, and this time Merlin does laugh, a little hysterically, because the sheer lunacy of the situation is finally catching up with him. “What exactly have you been telling her, Merlin?”

Merlin just shrugs, unrepentant. He deserves every bit of Alex’s misguided fury.

“You’ve got a thousand years to make up for,” he says, and Alex nods like she believes every word, and he loves her for it.

The shock on Arthur’s face melts into something sly and dangerous, frankly, for all it does to Merlin’s insides. “Well,” he says. “I’m sure I can think of _something_ to make it up to you.”

There’s no mistaking his implication, and Merlin flushes. He could blame it on the alcohol, probably, but Arthur’s smirking already and he definitely shouldn’t encourage it but he _missed_ that arrogance, so he just grins back at him.

“Now that that’s settled,” Alex says, and they both snap their attention back to her, and Merlin is more than a little gratified to see Arthur blush. She sets the glass down on the counter and beams between them. “What can I get you?”

Arthur’s opening his mouth, and Merlin is so, so tempted to get Alex to make him something pink and fruity and utterly revolting, but he’s never felt less like drinking than he does in this moment. Not even during that first awful hangover when Gaius forced his foul remedy down his and Lancelot’s throats.

“Just the check,” he says before Arthur can respond. Alex looks incredulous, but her smile is proud as she hands him the slip.

“And don’t come back,” she calls after them when they leave, and Merlin laughs, and grabs Arthur’s hand, and Arthur lets him, and Merlin turns to look at him.

Arthur smiles, and it’s blinding, and Merlin is never letting go.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time writing for the Merlin fandom, so I hope I did the characters justice! Please, please comment and let me know what you thought, or hit me up on Tumblr at ravenclawsandbeak if you get the urge, as I do, to scream about these fictional gays. Thank you so much for reading my i-have-too-many-feelings-about-bbc-merlin word vomit, you're all fabulous!
> 
> xoxo,  
> Istalria


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